Roy's Reflections-Cap gets shocked
by Washingtonmyhome
Summary: Roy's feelings about Captain Stanley's getting an electrical shock via a downed power line at an accident scene, and his feelings about Chet's becoming the self proclaimed 'diet guru' of Station 51 in The Great Crash Diet.


5

Roy's Reflections-Cap's electrocution

I can't sleep. Every time I try, I see the same disturbing image over and over again—Cap leaning next to the wrecked car, the downed power line striking the metal, starting a small brush fire and sending what could have been a deadly current through Cap's body. Then I see him falling backwards onto the ground. He's jerking back and forth in PAIN!

Over and over, like a cassette player being rewound and replayed multiple times, I just can't stop seeing the whole thing.

I see myself and Mike pulling Cap away from the car. Cap is still jerking back and forth even as I am trying to get his vitals.

There is a lump the size of Australia in my throat, and it feels like it's permanently lodged there.

If I could just fall asleep, maybe I could forget watching Cap getting an almost fatal dose of 'shock therapy'.

It's ironic. The shift started out pretty tame, actually. But, I suppose this is just another example of how quickly things can change. So, Cap sent us out to Oceanside Park to do a fire inspection. Ned, the manager of the park, gave us a quick tour. We spent several minutes watching their large Orca whale, whose name is Diminutive, swim around in the largest pool at the park. I've seen whales before, but never so big, at least not up close. Diminutive decided to give us a nice bath, just what I needed, to have my freshly cleaned uniform washed again. I've heard of wash and wear, but wear and wash?

Johnny quipped to Ned, "Ned, I'd say you've got a 'whale of an act' there."

Ned shot back, "John, I've only heard that joke 300 times".

"That few?" I wondered, as I tried to stifle my urge to giggle.

The inspection itself went pretty well. Oceanside Park does an excellent job of keeping itself in line with the fire codes. We did have to assist one of the divers who got his foot caught in the shipwreck in that same pool with Diminutive the Drencher. Luckily, the diver was all right except for his scraped up foot, which only needed a little first aid.

We got back to the station just in time for lunch: Mike's fried chicken and French fries. Doctor Morton was there. He's conducting a study for the county in hopes of improving our health so we can do our jobs better.

I must say I'm very much in favor of anything we can do to take better care of ourselves so we can withstand all the stresses of our jobs. But the rest of the guys, well, let's say they'd rather swim in shark infested waters dressed like a gigantic steak than change their health practices. Except for Chester B. Kelly. He has appointed himself the diet guru of Station 51. Egads! He is reading a book on dietary practices and quoting from it to justify serving us some kind of garbage from the health food store across the street from Rampart. Ugh.

Now, as I said, I want us to improve our health. But Chet is taking it to extremes with that nasty smelling green slimy stuff that looks like scum from that brackish sewage retention pond a mile from my house, and dry toast and figs. Yuck! The fact is, we have a very taxing job, both physically and emotionally, and we need to have a diet that takes that into account, something which Chet has conveniently forgotten.

So, Johnny and I drove to Rampart to get some more supplies and to talk to Morton about Chet's deciding he's the diet guru for Station 51. It was, unfortunately, a less than satisfying conversation, at least from our point of view. Oh, Morton said what we wanted to hear, that he would talk to Chet and tell him to ease off the extreme diet stuff. But, Johnny and I were left with the impression that Morton thought we were making the proverbial mountain out of the molehill. He just didn't seem to take us seriously enough. Go figure.

So, anyway we went back to the squad after that not so satisfactory conversation, and we got in and started to pull out of Rampart's parking lot. Dispatch sent us out to a car accident in Very Deep Canyon. A man had driven his car off the road into the canyon. Luckily, he was only off a few feet from the road, and Johnny took care of the patient, with the help of the witness who had called the accident in.

Cap was leaning up against the car, when a downed power line hit the metal of the car. Sparks flew out, and I could hear the cracking sound that live power lines make when they hit something. My stomach lurched as I watched Cap crumple to the ground and start writhing back and forth. I had a really tough time not vomiting up the dry toast and figs.

Now, I've been a paramedic long enough that I can usually keep myself together when I see these situations unfold. But, as I watched Cap thrashing about on the ground, I could feel that lump forming in my throat, and chills running up and down my spine. There was no time to examine my feelings right then. I had a job to do, and that was to take care of Cap.

So, I had to stuff my emotions of horror and guilt back into their box until the crisis was over and I could deal with them. I asked Marco to get me the EKG monitor. Once I had it hooked up, I could get Cap's heart rate and then I called Rampart. It wasn't easy to do, what with all the spasms Cap was having, combined with my emotions, which I was trying not to give into. Not only was I scared that Cap would die, but I was struggling with the sense of déjà vu and a bad case of the famous DeSoto guilt.

The déjà vu came from my remembering when I was a victim several months ago of my own case of 'shock therapy'. I had grabbed onto a live power line by mistake when I was trying to escape from a burning house. I will never forget the horrible tingling sensation that went through my body and the feeling of my heart stopping. We were working with a female paramedic trainee named Karen, and she had to defibrillate me to get my heart started again. Now, here I was watching Captain Stanley—the guy we look to for leadership—getting shocked. Oh, man, why did it have to be him? I suppose that just proves that being a captain in the fire department does not exempt that person from getting injured on the job.

The guilt came from the fact that I had seen that dangling power line, and I had not warned Cap or gotten him away from the car before the line hit the car. I'd seen the line falling out of the tree branch that it had been caught on as I was talking to Rampart about the patient that Johnny was treating. But, then again, everything had happened so fast: the power line falling and slapping the side of the car, the sparks flying from the end like a sparkler on the 4th of July, the crackling sound from the line, and Cap's fall. So, maybe, I would not have been able to keep Cap from being electrocuted.

It's well past midnight, I still can't sleep for thinking about all of this, and fighting with my guilt, wondering if there had been anything I could have done to prevent the incident from happening. Nobody sends me on these guilt trips except for me. I can certainly think of a lot of other trips I'd rather take.

Mike helped me get Cap away from the car. Then he raced up the hill back to the engine to report the Code I and request more help from L.A., including camp crews to fight the small brush fire the power line had ignited, and a crew from More Power To Ya Utilities to shut the electricity off. The ambulance arrived shortly after, with a big white truck from More Power To Ya following. By that time, our original patient and Cap were ready to transport. We got them aboard the ambulance and climbed in ourselves for the trip to Rampart.

We've all heard the saying 'Hindsight is 20-20'. It certainly rings true here, and maybe I'm not the only one who might be at fault for not taking care of the power line before one of us could get hurt by it. When we arrived at the scene, I noticed there was one power pole leaning over to one side, and we'd seen the suspended line. It had not made any contact with anything but the air yet even though it was caught in a tree. That line was trouble waiting to happen.

So, why didn't we call More Power To Ya immediately upon our arrival? One of the first things we learn at the fire academy is to make sure the scene is as safe as we can possibly make it before we try to do anything else. We broke that rule, and so we are all guilty of neglecting to take care of our safety. We know better, so what weren't we thinking? We certainly would have saved Cap a trip to Rampart.

While we were riding to Rampart in the ambulance, cap was conscious but quiet. Thankfully, his muscle spasms, except for the occasional twitch, had stopped. I was giving him oxygen along with the IV of D5W. Unfortunately, the road out of Very Deep Canyon is called Rather Rough Road, and the name fits. That road was riddled with huge potholes that make Lake Superior look like a little mud puddle, and they were filled with muddy water from last night's rain. Not only that, but there were protruding rocks, loose gravel, and stretches of road with washboards, which are ruts that follow each other in rapid succession like the grooves on an old fashioned washboard, hence the name. So, all these factors made for an uncomfortable ride for all of us, but especially our patients.

Cap tried to suck it up as much as he could. But he moaned in pain every time Jim, our ambulance driver, hit something bumpy, which was often since there was no way to avoid the rough spots.

Jim kept apologizing for hitting those rough spots. By the time we got to the main road to Rampart, Johnny and I were thoroughly sick of his apologies. But we kept our mouths shut and busied ourselves with our patients, because we had no choice but to put up with our bones being rattled. We weren't, after all, suffering nearly as much as our patients. And Jim couldn't help what the condition of the road was like.

So, after what had seemed like the longest ambulance ride in the history of ambulance rides, we arrived at Rampart. Johnny and his patient went to Room 5, and Cap and I went to Room 3.

Dr. Early and Carol Jennings were waiting in Room 3 to take care of Cap. I stayed with him as well. But, now that the crisis was past, I was feeling really emotionally drained. I barely managed to keep my voice normal as I reported Cap's latest vitals to the doctor and nurse. Cap was feeling better, though he was still in quite a bit of pain.

"Normal sinus rhythm," Dr. Early observed as he watched the heart monitor, its green line steadily marching across the screen. I was watching the monitor, too, relieved to see his heart rate was normal. Even so, I was all too aware that my emotional dam was reaching flood stage and the dam would soon burst open and spill all those feelings out.

"Doc, do you think you could give me something for the pain here?" Cap's voice seemed really far away as he made his request.

"Sure," Dr. Early told him. The doctor turned back to Carol. "Carol, 65 mg of meperidine." Carol went to get the medicine and Dr. Early turned back to Cap. "You're going to be fine," Dr. Early reassured the Captain.

"Doc, I appreciate it," Cap quietly replied. Tears stung my eyes, and I had to bite my lip to keep them from falling. Luckily, I managed to keep the dam from bursting.

Once Johnny and I had left the room with Dr. Early, we were reassured again that our captain would be fine.

Our spirits had been dampened by Cap's brush with death, and we were both quiet as we drove back to the station. We could not talk about the incident yet; we had to take time to process our own feelings about what had happened.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, except for a visit from Dr. Morton and several small fires that only the engine crew was needed on, the rest of the day was quiet. The quietness was good because it gave us time to deal with the emotional aftermath of Cap's getting shocked. But that quietness was also a double edged sword because it left us too much time to think about the events of the day. I keep thinking about what happened, and trying not to blame myself, but the what ifs keep running themselves through my mind, and I can't seem to shut them off the way I can turn off the defibrillator.

Trying to reconcile what my heart is telling me and what my mind is telling me is like trying to decide whether to fish or cut bait.

In my heart, I know I'm not truly responsible for Cap's becoming a victim of electrical shock.

But my head is not buying that argument. It keeps saying 'It's your fault, Roy, because you didn't warn Cap or pull him away from the car before the power line fell'. Well, which is right? My heart or my head?

Oh, shut up, both of you! You're driving me crazy! I once said Johnny was a nut. Well, right now, I'm not sure that I'm not more of a nut than Johnny is. He's asleep on his bed in the dorm; at least he was the last I knew. I'm sitting here unable to sleep fighting with two different voices in my head, both of which are giving me contradictory arguments about my culpability in this incident.

And the longer I sit here on this couch in the dayroom, tying myself in knots over this experience, the worse my remorseful feelings are getting. Why do I do this to myself?

I don't know. Maybe it's some sort of masochistic desire for self-flagellation. Or it's a need for power over things in my world. Perhaps it's both at the same time. But what use is any of this? There's only so much I can do. I cannot control everything in my world—I can't even control most things in my world. I watched the events unfold: the power line falling and hitting the car, the sparks flying and starting the brushfire, and Cap's falling onto the ground and writhing back and forth. But there was nothing I could do to stop anything from happening. I want that ability to control things in my world, but again, there's only so much I can do.

Ironic, isn't it? I work in a dangerous profession. Things can turn against us very easily, and although we do our best to minimize the dangers, we can't prepare for every possibility. It just does not work that way. But I still feel this need for control.

Perhaps that is part of why I became a paramedic—that need for control even in some small way of how we are affected by events in life. If I hadn't had the paramedic training, I would not have been able to come to Cap's aid when he needed it, and he WOULD have died, and I would have been helpless to stop a death that could have been prevented.

So, I did have control over that part of today's events. Mike and I got Cap away from the live power line, and I was able to treat his injury and keep further damage from occurring. Although we couldn't keep him from getting shocked, Cap is alive and recovering because we acted to minimize the damage.

Well, I know my guilty feelings are unwarranted, and I need to let them go before they eat me up inside. I did what I could do, and that was to treat the shock. So, now to go to bed and hopefully stop beating myself up over the incident.


End file.
